The Shasta Gate

by Dick Croy

  The road washed away his depression. Layer by layer L.A. fell gradually away: a decomposing in reverse as the essence of the place emerged. The Tehachapis, L.A.’s northern frontier, lifted him out of the basin’s fetid air and finally above the clouds until it seemed he was on the rim of morning. Within the hour, though, he was descending the Grapevine, the twisting pass into the San Joaquin Valley, past a serpentine convoy of tractor-trailer rigs out-muscling gravity with gears growling lower than Paul Robeson beginning “Old Man River”.

  Eugene liked running the Central Valley. There was nothing phony or cheerfully optimistic about that pastel emptiness. Man, it ran straight up the center of the state. Right up the barrel, right up the gut. The Harley always devoured it.

  * * *

  …A man towers over her like a tree. He speaks but no words reach her ears—only monstrous inhuman sounds muffled or distorted by his immensity, and sleep. She knows she is dreaming, yet that doesn’t allay this terrible fear. For she knows that dream itself is real. It’s not that she fears what this enormous creature might do to her, but that she is so insignificant in his presence—unable even to understand the terrible rumblings of his speech. He embodies a whole world which she realizes in despair she knows nothing about. Where is this world? What is he trying to say? What are you trying to say, Daddy? What are you trying to say?

  The question has become a shriek of such ferocity it burns her lungs. Is that smoke coming from her mouth? Is she burning from within? She has to wake up—she’ll be consumed while she sleeps! People bursting spontaneously into flame, burning to ashes in front of horrified spectators. She must awake!

  Her eyes opened. Not another muscle moved—but she was exhausted. She’d been swimming against a mighty tide. When would she be free of that dream? It varied from time to time but not fundamentally. The towering figure so beyond her its speech was like thunder moving away with a storm was a conflation of her father and everything else in the world she feared or dreaded, consciously and unconsciously. She knew that much. Some good it did.

  Catherine no longer really feared her father, just disliked him. Despised him in the worst of times. But probably some part of her that hadn’t grown up—very likely because of her childhood fear, a specific incident perhaps—hung on with frozen fascination to memories her conscious self had repudiated. What other things was she afraid of, besides that basic anxiety of not knowing where her life was going—one most people shared? Didn’t they? Surely that wasn’t enough to prolong this goddamn dream all these years.

  Sunlight streamed into her room through the starched white curtains. The tinkling of glass somewhere. Birds made a glittering mosaic of sound in the boughs of her brooding thoughts. If she concentrated, their songs penetrated her dark mood, as if her mind were parting the obscuring branches. But she was too tired to concentrate, too depressed and distressed by the residue her dream had left over the morning’s brightness.

  Stretching her heavy, mildly aching limbs, Catherine noticed a spot of blood on the sheet and rolled her eyes in an expression of smoldering anger. What a shitty day this was starting out to be. She threw back the sheet savagely, jumbled through her dresser drawer for a tampon and dressed hurriedly. She was merciless with her hair. Each stroke hurt her, increasing the severity of the next until she slammed the brush down on her dressing table with a scream of rage.

  About to storm out of her room to ride, she glimpsed her contorted face in the mirror. Strangely, the sight calmed her immediately. She took a deep breath and sat down, her eyes never leaving the face of the woman in the mirror. Her gaze moved up to the eyes and held them. She became calmer still: not less distressed but more in control and accepting of her emotional state. Finally she rose with calm deliberation to find Ram.

  “I don’t want any breakfast this morning, ‘Cille,” she said, entering the kitchen and leaving through the back door before the surprised woman could even greet her. Ram was working a yearling on a long lead rope in the corral. “Will you ride with me?” Catherine called to him. They were saddled and down the lane within five minutes.

  For some time they rode in silence. Catherine didn’t want to begin just anywhere and end up rambling incoherently like some moron aimlessly turning the late night radio dial. She wasn’t about to give Ram the impression she was that lost and out of control. She didn’t want to waste his time and energy either. Ram let her juices simmer.

  “…You know what the biggest myth about the human race is?” she finally asked. “It’s that what sets us apart from the ‘lower’ animals is our ability to build on knowledge from one generation to the next. What a crock of shit! We don’t learn a damn thing.”

  Ram smiled at this prototypical opening. It was customary that the more desperately Catherine needed to discuss a personal problem, the further removed from it she tried to appear. He made no answer.

  “Why is it after what—two million years?—we still don’t have it together? Every other species has worked out some kind of relationship with the planet. But we haven’t handed down any answers or patterns to follow, and we’ve been asking the same goddamned questions for thousands of years. Are we really that stupid? It’s a wonder we’ve survived as long as we have!”

  “Why don’t you tell me what’s bothering you?” Ram asked gently.

  “I am! There ought to be some guidelines for people to follow—when they’re breaking away from their families and trying to make it on their own. I’m not talking about predetermined cookie-cutter careers or anything like that, but some simple…I don’t know—guidelines. Like your tribal rituals. Initiation. Why don’t we have any rituals?”

  “I’m afraid you’d find them too confining. They exact a great deal in individual freedom for the sense of continuity they provide.”

  “But at least they gave you some kind of communal framework, didn’t they? To build on. What does our society give us? Nothing! What do our families give us? What families?” She was almost crying. He remembered how as a child and fighting sleep, she would work herself into a state of infantile rage to simultaneously release and exhaust herself.

  “What the hell are we supposed to do with our lives, Ram? My life is shit. I’ve really messed it up.” She fought back the surge of self-pity welling up in her throat. It would be too humiliating to be overcome by it in Ram’s presence. “…And yet, there’s no one I’d trade places with. I can’t see that I’m in worse shape than anyone else. Most people sell themselves out for so little. They’re such whores.

  “But it’s intolerable all the same, Ram. It’s driving me fucking crazy.” She was no longer riding but simply being carried along by Jebel Druze. Ram knew that she had to let go—if not here and now then soon. He reined over to a grove of lodgepole pines and the stallion followed. They dismounted onto a thick carpet of needles and walked wordlessly—Catherine lethargically in the confusion and profusion of her emotions—to a fallen tree.

  There was an overlook here. The land sloped down to a forest of pine, Doug fir, and cedar. Beyond the girdle of evergreens were low foothills climbing to a ridge which the shadow of a massive rack of cumulus had bisected into halves of light and shade. Behind them was the mountain. They sat down on the broad girth of the tree.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing at the ranch, and I don’t know what I’m doing at school,” she continued. “But I can’t figure out where else I should be.”

  “You are here,” he said. “Life is not to be ‘figured out.’ It will always elude you.”

  “But I’ve got to have some kind of plan don’t I? Some idea where I’m going? I can’t just be wandering around trying this, trying that—there isn’t time. I could make some serious mistakes right now.”

  “Make them.”

  “What do you mean, make them? I make enough mistakes as it is without trying to make them.”

  “Make them and get rid of them. Hold on to nothing.”

  She could see that Ram wasn’t going to elaborate. His typically laconic an
swer made sense somehow anyway, or she suspected it would when she’d had time to think about it. In any case the worst of her anxiety had passed, like a forest fire leaving a burned and smoking hillside behind.

  “…I’m afraid, Ram. I can’t just…let go like that. I don’t know where I’d land.”

  “Your fear is as natural as your skin,” he said gently, putting his arm around her grateful shoulders. “So is the anger inside.” He took a deep breath, his huge hand spread out across his chest for emphasis. “Feel them. Feel them both.”

  “Why is it natural to be afraid? That feels so…twisted.” Her face reflected her words: she felt as though she stood for all mankind, asking her question in the agony of a whole species.

  Ram sighed: “I have no answer for that. Don’t look for answers to your pain in words, Catherine. Find them here—” he swept his hand away from his chest in a gesture of strength, bulging the muscles in his forearm—“in the world.”

  * * *

  When they rode back to the ranch, Douglas was waiting for them. He hung out with Catherine while she brushed the stallion, then walked to the house with her. “Would you like t’ see somethin’ I made?” he asked shyly.

  “Sure! What is it?”

  He pulled her around the house to the long side porch onto which his bedroom opened. So this was what she’d heard this morning. “Douglas—they’re beautiful! Did you make them?”

  “Yep, I did.” The expression on his face was as radiant as the bits of stained glass he had fashioned with wire and meticulous workmanship into wind chimes suspended within an astonishingly sophisticated mobile. Delicate transparent shapes spun volutes and whorls of color in the air: crystal songbirds of luminous plumage. The arabesque of wire that caged them belied its function with fragile curvilinear grace.

  Catherine looked from the flight of glass to Douglas’s face, absorbed in his creation—which the wind ceaselessly recreated in fluid movement, sound and color—and when she returned to the wind chimes, she was seeing them this time through his eyes. Time seemed to stop for a moment. …She saw there not the random and abstract glitter she had just experienced and called beauty. She perceived an order, a flowing composition so exquisite that tears came, spontaneously and instantaneously. Then, unable to see clearly, she actually heard the music Douglas had somehow wrought not in wind and glass but in intuition or even…could she call it “divine grace”? Catherine wasn’t a musician. Even less was she in any way religious—and certainly she was no visionary artist. Yet suddenly she was all of these.

  Then, just as quickly, the moment vanished. What she was looking at was a mobile made of tinkling glass: lovely but prosaic, in a way which said nothing about the object and everything about her way of seeing it. That much she had just learned—from this boy. From Douglas!

  “…I seen a whole bunch a these wind chimes at the fair last summer,” he was saying. “But Aunt Lucille said we didn’t have enough money t’ buy one. So I made my own. I got the colored glass out of a window I found up in the loft. It was broke anyway. The big pieces are from a chan-de-lier in the attic.”

  Catherine found herself shaking her head in wonder at the contrast she confronted here. Her vision wasn’t completely gone after all. An after-image of sorts remained: a warmly reverberant feeling in her breast, where before there had been anguish. “Well it’s just beautiful, Douglas,” she heard herself replying. “I heard them this morning in bed.”

  “Sometimes I get real agitated,” he said, his voice seeming almost to caress the bits of glass he had put together and now gazed at with such profound satisfaction. “It used to be I couldn’t do nothin’ about it, ‘cept sometimes I’d just run an’ run, hollerin’ as loud as I could. But now I come here. Sit right down on the ground if it’s not wet. I can hear ‘em real good in my room too.”

  The focus of his concentration shifted to her. He put his hand tentatively—no longer shyly now—on her arm. Douglas looked at her for a moment with a gentle directness, then reached up to fondle one of the pendants, its edge polished to a milky opacity, smooth as the rim of a goblet. “You know what happens, Cathrun? I get t’ feelin’ like I’m up there with them pieces a glass. I can feel the wind on me, and pretty soon it’s blowin’ me. Then I forget about bein’ agitated. I feel the sun on my face…and you know what, Cathrun? I feel myself shinin’, just like the glass!”

  He was shining now. Catherine threw her arms around him. “Oh, Douglas—that’s wonderful!” His own arms and those big hands grasped her with an awkwardness due not so much to self-consciousness as to simple unfamiliarity with the act. She looked up at him admiringly. “Have you eaten lunch? Come have some with me.” She grabbed his hand. “Then you can help me saddle Jebel. I’m going riding again!”

  * * *

  It had been a long day but he’d made it. From the highway Shasta was everything Eugene had heard about it. He began to look for a place to camp. The main requirement was an unobstructed view of the mountain he’d be getting to know. This was beautiful ranch country; there was bound to be plenty of water around.

  Having at last reached his goal, Eugene felt invigorated, charged with the energy of his summer plans. Damn, he was here! He fired into the gentle curve ahead of him and observed with approval the prosperous-looking ranch that emerged to his left.

  He didn’t hold the image long. There, on the crest of a hill on the other side of the road, was a striking young woman on a magnificent, nearly silver Arabian horse. What haughty pride in their pose—against a backdrop of Shasta itself! The sight was too much. Who was this, the mountain’s emissary? Well, if she’d been sent to greet him, he’d be downright rude to ignore her. Before he’d had time to think about what he was doing, he wheeled impulsively off the highway and across the meadow toward her.

  Catherine couldn’t believe what she was seeing. This clown was crazy! The stallion reared as the loud machine bounced and lurched heavily up the slope. She stood in the stirrups against his mane. When he came down her calves commanded Jebel Druze to move, but he didn’t need to be told. He bolted away as Eugene bore down on them, beginning now to wonder himself what the hell he was doing. Catherine screamed at him over her shoulder, enraged: “Get OUT of here!”

  Was she in trouble? The utter stupidity of what he was doing came to him as if he were awakening from a trance. His attention on the girl and her plight, Eugene didn’t really see the fence they were approaching until it was too late to stop. She and the horse jumped it gracefully. He plowed right into it.

  Catherine thundered ahead, with a backward glance at her pursuer. Her vengeful laugh had a savagery to it as the bike went down, throwing dirt and its leather-jacketed rider. Eugene rolled expertly when he hit the ground. He wouldn’t feel the impact till later. From one elbow he saw that the girl had the horse under control; she was safe. The bike lay tangled in the fence, its front wheel spinning freely. He looked at it ruefully for a moment—then threw back his head and laughed. What a horse’s ass he’d just made of himself! He’d arrived all right.

  Chapter 14

  The humor in the situation was gone. The run-in with the fence had neatly removed Eugene’s carburetor, breaking the hose clamp in the process. The carburetor hadn’t been damaged and was relatively simple to put back on, but it wouldn’t do him any good without a hose clamp. In the meantime, the sun wouldn’t be getting any higher, he hadn’t found a place to spend the night, and he had no idea how far it was to the nearest service station. What made this all the harder to accept was the way it had happened. How could he have been so stupid? What in the world had come over him?

  He was about to push the bike onto the highway when a familiar faint hum vibrated in the air momentarily before distance reclaimed the sound. …No, it couldn’t be; he wouldn’t get out of this that easily. Morosely he wheeled the bike out onto the deserted pavement and aimed it toward town, Mt. Shasta City, the Harley’s big 1200-cubic centimeter engine now reduced to 1 manpower.

  The distant hum
faded in again, louder now. It was unmistakably a bike, more than one. Damn, maybe he was going to turn his luck around before dusk after all! The wind played with the sound, pulled it apart, tearing the droning monotone into a tattered chord: there were a bunch of ‘em. Then it struck him. He knew who they were.

  * * *

  If he’d run into them again on the interstate, it wouldn’t have been so surprising. But on this little two-lane road—a thousand miles from where their paths had crossed? It could hardly be coincidental.

  As the gang rode up behind him, Eugene prepared himself mentally with a centering exercise, in which he visualized a cross in the middle of his chest, the center of his being. Although he normally saw this mental image in the shape of the Christian symbol, there was nothing religious as far as he was concerned about its purpose. The cross hairs of a gunsight might have been just as effective in focusing his concentration and energy; he just took what came. From his irritation a minute earlier, he felt himself becoming simultaneously composed…and coiled. “Centered.” Trusting himself to be prepared—and who knew what these jokers had in mind—allowed him to relax. He appeared, at least, to be perfectly at ease.

  “Whatsamatter—she run away wit’cha, boy?” It was the punk, the vet’s buddy.

  “Hey man, you got saddle sores?” said the one who bore too strong a resemblance to James Dean for his own good.

  “Naw, I think he had a ac-ci-dent,” drawled the Fool, exaggerating the word sarcastically.